Ellen DeGeneres Says Usain Bolt Tweet Wasn’t Meant to Be Racist

Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt is a very fast man—the fastest on the planet, some might say, after his many victories against the other extremely quick runners. Last weekend, while Bolt was winning another gold in the 100-meter race, he turned his head slightly, and a camera caught his smiling face in focus while his blurry competition tried to keep up. It led to some fun memes—like this one or this one.

Daytime talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres regularly puts her own Ellen-themed spin on the most popular memes from all across the Internet, and the Bolt photo is no different. Except that when the Photoshop was all said and done, many people on Twitter pointed out that the final effect looked racially pointed.

DeGeneres has taken the heat for jokes deemed racist many times before. Last October, her show created a skit that offered “a very exclusive sneak peek” of Nicki Minaj’s sitcom about her childhood that will debut on ABC’s Freeform network. In it, a family of Minaj characters have massively exaggerated butts and they move through the set knocking things over. At the time, Rich Juzwiak of Gawker’s television vertical Morning After wrote, “It was a joke, see, except . . . what exactly was the joke? That Nicki Minaj has a big butt? (OK, fine, but that’s just the truth, not really . . . a joke?) That black people have big butts? That black dogs have big butts? That black women’s bodies are absurd?”

DeGeneres also appeared in a parody of Minaj’s “Anaconda” video and dressed up as Minaj for Halloween. Each video, along with the Usain Bolt tweet, remain on DeGeneres’s site and social feed, except for the Nicki Minaj butt sketch. VF.com has reached out to DeGeneres’s representatives for comment.